This time I’ve decided to write about a typical day in my EVS project because I think many of you would be interested to hear some more info about it. My EVS project is in a primary school in Leeds where my task is to support the teaching stuff in general and to give French classes at least once a week.
The school starts at 9 am and I usually leave around 3.30 pm. As my school is a Church of England school the day usually starts with a 15 or 30 minutes long assembly where the head teacher or some special visitors talk about a certain topic usually connected to the Christian values. Then depending on my schedule I go to one of the classes. I usually help out in 2 different classes (years) a day so I work with children from the age of 3 to 11.
My tasks depend on the teachers and on which age group I’m working with. These tasks can be for example to help the children with maths, to listen to individual readers, to read to the children, to play with the small children or to take small groups to a different classroom and work on a specific task they have to accomplish. On Fridays, I have my own French group which I am solely responsible for; that means that I’m responsible for both the planning and the execution of the particular lesson and that there are no other teachers present in the classroom.
Apart from working directly with the children, sometimes I’m asked to support the teacher assistants with for example setting up a display on the classroom’s wall or to print out, cut out or laminate various photos. Once I even helped to make some costumes for the children to wear for their special Christmas performance.
All in all, I really like that every day I have different tasks to do in my project so I never have two identical days. Apart from this, the teachers and teacher assistants are all really nice and the children are just wonderful and great fun to be around!
By Lilla Lakatos, EVS (European Voluntary Service) volunteer in Leeds (UK).
Project part of Everything Is Possible EVS project ”With YOUth In Mind”
supported by the British Council
and the Youth In Action programme
of the European Commission.
